There was a call for a bulldozer operator for the Kearny Mesa job when he checked in with the union at San Diego. He met Gene at the Hogan and Griffith office. He liked her immediately; a slender, almost thin girl with dark eyes and dark, short hair. He liked the fast, breathless way she talked, her crooked smile; there was something about her that told him she was the kind of girl he should marry.
He had lied when he told her he loved her. He didn’t love anyone. He was through with that because V had finished it in him. He was through playing the game, but he was going to be sure nobody played it with him.
He was satisfied with the way he had made the break with V. They hadn’t written for a long time, he was not going back to Bakersfield, and the thing would never have a chance to begin again. But he thought of her sometimes. He could not stop himself from thinking about her; it was like a wisdom tooth coming through, the pain acute for a time, but gradually the gum would grow over and there would be long periods when he did not think of her at all. V would marry someone in Bakersfield and settle down, and he would marry Gene. It was all over.
The job on the mesa was pushing gravel from the rock crusher to the hopper of the hot plant where the paving for the air field was mixed and loaded into dump trucks. It was dirty work. He had to wear a respirator and goggles and by the time he had finished his first run in the morning he would be covered with rock dust and asphalt. Asphalt stuck in his hair where it was not covered by his cap, his clothes were always stiff and black with it and his face, when he turned in at night, would be completely black except for three circles, a big one around his nose and mouth and smaller ones over his eyes.
Ordinarily he would have quit such a job the first day. In the Seabees he had been a kind of equipment boss, and Commander Smith had written him a letter recommending him as a grade foreman. But he knew it would be impossible to get a foreman’s job directly, and he had not even held out for a grader because he wanted to go right to work. So he stuck with it, and when one of the other skinners quit, Smitty put him on a grader, working the fine grade with Arch Huber.
He was a little surprised when Gene said she would marry him. It had not occurred to him that she might refuse, but he was surprised suddenly at the realization that he was going to be married. He found he was pleased. He wanted to be married. He wanted it to be as soon as possible.
But one night after work he was driving down the street toward his rooming house, slowing down and pulling over to the curb to park, when he saw V.
At first he did not recognize her. She was carrying a suitcase, looking up at the numbers on the houses. He was behind her, and he only knew she looked familiar. He watched her because she was blonde and had good legs, but he had the confused feeling that she was someone he knew who was completely out of place, that she was a person connected in his mind with somewhere else and had no reason for being here.
He frowned, letting the Mercury idle along behind her, studying her legs, and the square shoulders in the white coat, and the familiar hair, and then he was conscious of the pattern of the rapping of her heels. His legs seemed nerveless as he raised his foot to the brake pedal.
The car slowed, jerking along in high gear with his foot off the accelerator. His mind was blank. The world was silent except for the unmistakable sound of V’s heels. He watched her pass the telephone pole, the two garbage cans on the curb, and then she turned and saw him.
She stepped off the sidewalk and came over to the car. She opened the door, lifted her suitcase in, and sat down on the seat beside him. They sat and looked at each other, the Mercury nosed into the curb, the motor dead; V incredibly sitting beside him and looking exactly as he remembered her, her breathing uneven and beads of perspiration sparkling on the curve of her upper lip, looking tired, her eyes round and a little bloodshot and most of her lipstick gone. He compared her with the image in his memory; the tiny mole above her nose in the vertical crease of her forehead, the soft down on the undersides of her cheeks, the blonde hair that almost met her eyebrows at the sides of her head, the minute bare ridge around the edges of her lipstick. Her lips seemed larger than he remembered and instead of in the middle, her hair was parted now on one side and held with a silver clip. She was a picture he was studying, trying to determine its authenticity. And she sat staring back at him.
Slowly, wonderingly, he began to feel what she had always made him feel, as though he had been plugged into an electric socket, or as though there were a sun suddenly in the car, with the special kind of warmth the sun had had when they were sitting against the D-4 caterpillar in the orchard at the ranch. He reached down and pressed the starter button. He picked up her suitcase and pushed it into the back seat. It was a new suitcase, tan, with dark brown stripes. The motor whirred silently. V still stared at him, smiling, her eyes round.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said. It was a comment, he expected no answer, and she gave none, arranging her skirt over her knees. There was a run in her stocking. He pulled the gear lever into low and the car moved forward. When he looked at her again she leaned toward him and put her hand on his leg.
Night came while they were in the cabin in the auto court. From yellow, the shaded west window had gradually merged with the darkness of the room, and Jack sat on the edge of the bed beside V, staring down at her. He could see the thin, glinting lines of her open eyes.
He put out his hand. Carefully, almost shyly, he touched her arm. Her arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists crossed, and he moved his fingers down over her arm. He touched her breast. He touched the nipple. He felt the sudden hard hollow between and below her breasts. He moved his hand to touch her stomach and her thigh and when he could reach no further down her leg without moving, he withdrew his hand. She was perfect, all of her was perfect, and dumbly he felt that it was her perfection that hurt him, for he had never been so shaken, and shaken he had soared and fallen achingly beyond the limits of his understanding.
But the perfection was not only of her, it was of the both of them. This feeling that, when he lay with her, was emotion powered and expanded a thousand times beyond itself, was almost too big for him to be capable of feeling, and was enormously too big for him to express; it left him tottering on the lip of a valley filled with the musically screamed answers to all the questions he had never been able to ask, or had only vaguely felt, or had never known he had felt until he heard the answers. It tore at him with a torment of seeking, and in an excruciating light had almost let him see. But somehow it had all destroyed itself and he feared it now as though some hideous, perverted evil had tricked him and trapped him.
V was speaking to him but he did not hear her. His mind had been wrenched and now he felt drained and weak and afraid. He felt completely absorbed into her, as though she were the two of them, and he, as an individual, had been destroyed. He heard her say, “Jack, it’s all over now.”
“What?” he said.
“I said it’s all over now. We can live without hurting each other.” He felt the soft touch of her hand on his slumped back, but he did not answer. The words did not connect. He tried to put them together with a mind that was groping elsewhere. “What?” he said again.
“Don’t you understand, Jack?” V said patiently. He heard her move. She said, “All that’s over. We can’t hurt each other anymore. Do you love me, Jack?” Her voice was vibrant, and it seemed to fill the room.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought of Gene.
“I love you,” V said.
“If we’d only known a long time ago.”
Again he felt the touch of her hand on his bare back. He shivered, and he reached around behind him and took the hand in his. He felt it carefully, the fingernails, fingers, knuckles, the crotch between the thumb and first fingers, the hard bone of the wrist, the soft hairs of the forearm. The arm was connected to V but he could not see the rest of her in the dark. “I love you now,” he said.
He was trying to think clearly. He wanted to know himself, to understand this, he wanted to be truthful to himself and to V. It was more than the fact that he had made a bargain, more than the fact that he wanted to hurt V, but he did not know what all it was and he could only say when he knew.
“I love you now,” he repeated. “But I love you too much and I don’t love you enough. There’s too much…I don’t love you enough, V,” he said.
She gasped and her hand was gone.
“Wait,” he said. “I know what I did to you. I know that. But you’ve done too much to me too. There’s just too much…”
“It was the only way I knew to keep you!” V cried. “Oh, please see my side! There’s never been anybody but you. Those were all lies about…”
“It was Red that made it too much, I guess,” he interrupted. “That happened because of us, and now…”
“Jack!” she cried again. “It’s only one more reason why this has to stop now!”
“Yeah,” he said.
“No! No! I don’t mean that. Why we have to stop hurting each other. It can be all right if we stop that.”
His shoulders ached as he slumped forward. He shook his head doggedly. He was trying, too, to shake off the instinct that now he should hurt her, for he could hurt her cruelly for those letters, for Bakersfield, for all of it. He could stab her and twist the knife and make her beg and watch her writhe. He hated this feeling of wanting to hurt her, because the feeling hurt him. He hated this way she made him feel. But it was too strong and it burst from his lips like vomit. “How do I know you love me?” he said.
He shuddered with revulsion at himself. He could hear her breath whispering through her lips. When she spoke her voice shook. She said, “It’s always been that. Why do you need to ask that? Why do you think I came down here? Why…” Her voice broke off again and again he could hear her breath whispering through her lips. He wondered if she were crying.
It amazed him that he could do this. Too much hurting had been done already and he knew this was just something else stacked before him that he must pay for. “I’m getting married,” he said quickly. “Next week.”
Her breathing came faster, then not so fast, and then she seemed not to breathe at all. “Who?” she whispered.
“A girl,” he said. “A girl from the office.”
There was a movement beside him and V was sitting up. Her hands grasped his arms, her face was thrust close to his, frighteningly white, the eyes closed as though she didn’t want to see him, her closed eyes two dark, shadowed holes in the white face. Her fingernails dug into his arms. “You’re lying!” she said.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re lying!” she whispered. “You’re lying!” she repeated, shaking her head. “You love me!” she said fiercely.
He didn’t speak. Her fingernails cut into the flesh of his arms. Her eyes opened and seemed to touch his face like fingers. “Why?” she cried. “Oh, God, don’t! Don’t! We’ve got to stop this!”
“I’m going to marry her.”
The hands let go his arms and she was gone. He could feel the pressure on his leg where she had rested, but he couldn’t see her anymore. Then he heard her whisper, “Is she pretty?”
“She’s all right.”
“Jack! You just told me you loved me!”
“Okay. That wasn’t all I said.”
“Why don’t you hit me if you want to hurt me so? Why don’t you hit me like you hit Red?”
He felt absolved; he said tiredly, “See?”
She was crying, a painful, hopeless sound. “Oh, damn you, Jack,” she whispered.
“I tried to tell you.”
“You lied! You wanted to hurt me. All right, you’re going to. This’ll be the worst. You’ll win. But you’re going to hurt yourself. And this girl, too. Don’t you see what you’re going to do to this girl?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “You will, you fool. Oh, you fool, Jack.” She sounded as though she were lost somewhere, crying fretfully where no one could hear her, sobbing bitterly; he heard her say, half to herself, “You never understood what we had.”
“I understood what you damn well had,” he said fiercely. “Yes, but you’re never going to get me again! You’d break me right down to the ground. You take the man out of me. Do you want to know? I’m scared of you, damn you! And I’m ashamed. Do you understand? You’ve ruined it. You have! You…” He stopped, panting, shaking, straining his eyes to see her. He was terrified that he might never be rid of her. She was a cancer in him. By sending her away he was hurting her, yes—but hurting himself, too, for he could never be through with her.
He felt her hand on his arm. It tightened, pulling him down beside her. Her leg pressed against his. “That’s all over,” she whispered. “Listen, we can get married tonight. We can drive…”
“No,” he said through his teeth. “I meant it.”
“We can drive over to Arizona,” V went on. “Tonight. We can never let each other go, Jack.”
He pulled away from her roughly. “It’s all over,” he said, and he stood up and took his shirt from the chair. She did not speak while he dressed, but when he walked toward the light-outlined rectangle of the door, she said, “Jack!”
He turned, his hand holding the knob.
“It’s not over,” she said. “It will never be over.” She had stopped crying.
He didn’t reply, standing staring toward her. He couldn’t see her but he wanted to remember her like this, this the last time. He could still feel the place on his leg where her leg had touched, and he pitied her.
He turned and went out the door. Something inside him was raw and tender, and bitter in his throat.